Not so long ago, in the Year of Our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Fifty-Four, Hollywood saw fit to release a major motion picture (MGM! CinemaScope!) that endorsed, sanctioned, and ultimately made light of kidnapping, rape, and deep, unshakable misogyny. Women as property. Where one broad is just as good as the next, and dames, well, they’re as interchangeable as piston rods.
Sure, they can talk and all, but we’ll reduce them to their domestic duties, thank you very much, which had better include a talent for whipping together a pancake breakfast that could feed a small army. Scrambled eggs by the metric ton, with enough bacon to put the area’s pigs on notice for extinction. The film was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and yes, it was a box office smash. Because nothing spells entertainment quite like reducing one-half of the population to dehumanization and servitude.
I know what you’re thinking: first of all, the musical is set in 1850, among the vast Oregon wilderness no less; hardly the time to invoke Betty Friedan and abortion on demand. Fair enough. But even in Eisenhower’s America, it still remains quite shocking that audiences from coast to coast, quite instinctively, roared their approval for such retrograde notions. Or maybe it doesn’t. After all, images of vacuuming mothers in ball gowns and pearls were as ubiquitous as duck-and-cover drills. Being lippy got those lips nice and fat, and if a woman had an opinion, it had better be limited to the serving temperature of that evening’s roast.
It’s a short line indeed from domesticity to slavery, and in most cases, it’s only a matter of degree. Maybe it was all just starry-eyed nostalgia for a time when even the dumbest of dumbbells could secure a looker with appropriate birthing hips and not a law existed to prevent the simple act of plucking her from the city’s streets, screaming and thrashing be damned. Objections were for the courts, and the courts, well, they only met once in a blue moon. And even then, only to determine the price of corn.
As offensive as it is to believe that ribald, peppy tunes could be constructed around a story involving coercion by chokehold, it’s even more revolting that the men under discussion – the “seven brothers” of the title – would be seen as the epitome of masculine virtue when they are, to a ginger mane, among the most idiotic representations of manhood even conceived. Not a one can read or write, few have mastered the language beyond a grunt, and whenever together, the sum total of their collective imagination is something akin to a bloody brawl.
Men gather, men erupt in hair-trigger rage, and literally everything becomes a battle royale of beatings and broken bones. A proving ground to test one’s worth. Every last one of these buffoons hates books, inhales food sans utensils, and could no more articulate a position on the weather than refrain from using scrawls and scratches in the dirt to express an idea. As if an idea ever occurred to any of the brutes. They’d be cavemen, but even cavemen had mastered the ability to dress themselves.
The Pontipee clan had been, for years, content to eke out an existence without the female persuasion, only it’s clear that by the time we catch sight of them, masturbation and rationalized incest had finally worn out their welcome. Adam, the eldest of the bunch, has finally decided to get married. Sure, he’s going to pack identification, courtship, and falling in love into a 90-second time frame, but these are desperate times, and the dishes won’t wash themselves. Besides, the six younger brothers have been wearing the same pajamas for a good decade, and the smell can no longer be masked by the burnt offerings that pass as dinner.
Since going to town is, at best, a twice-a-year event, Adam is not about to wait out another winter. Today is the day. He eyes his prize, Milly, and, like all women throughout time, she succumbs to the irrefutable logic that what a man wants, he gets, because even the Bible hasn’t yet acknowledged female agency. We just got used to the idea that they had functioning brains. A minister is found, the deal secured, and off they go back to the isolated homestead. Naturally, they both belt out gleeful tunes about the glory of love, even though they haven’t yet exchanged names. Oh, and Adam left out one small detail: his six brothers. Yeah, you’re going to have to clean up their shit, too. We’re married now, so take up your objections with my clenched fist.
From that moment on, the film wrestles with the idea that once one brother is getting some, the rest are soon to follow. They too want this marriage thing, even if the arrangement, to them, is little more than round-the-clock fucking, interrupted by the occasional sock-mending. The Pontipee cabin is about to become the Beaver State’s most notorious brothel, even if nobody is paying for shit. But before that glorious day, the baboons need to meet actual females, which is conveniently taken care of with the region’s annual barn raising, an event that serves as a way to help struggling farmers get up to speed, as well as providing a dating service for the mountain’s unhitched idiots.
The six remaining bachelors like what they see (conveniently, all six women present look as if they were born to appear in a Hollywood musical) and they hatch a plot to ride into town the next day, place bags over hysterical heads, and return, beaming with pride. I forgot to mention that there’s one hell of a dance-off during the barn raising, and I imagine it’s that sequence that garnered the film a Best Picture nomination. It seems odd that anyone at any time thought watching backflips atop planks of wood was the zenith of an evening’s entertainment, but when the world could literally end at any moment, we were content with distractions by the bushel. All I kept thinking about was that the barn could have been finished hours earlier had everyone not decided it was a grand idea to juggle hammers and saws in the midst of an untamed forest.
Okay, so the chicks are kidnapped. Remarkably, they do protest, but given that it’s the middle of winter and the pass will be closed for months, what are they going to do? So, after a few songs, they relent, and within a few days, they’re imagining what it might be like to be ravaged by a lumberjack with an IQ barely above room temperature. Let’s face it: once these savages shave, bathe, and put on clean shirts, the deal doesn’t seem half bad. Hell, it’s not like they were going to college or opening up a saloon or something. This is life in 1850. Get married, submit, and die one lonely night during childbirth. It could be worse and usually was.
Eventually, there’s a birth, the great thaw, and of course, the angry townsfolk arrive, demanding answers for why their sisters and daughters were spirited away under cover of darkness. The story of the Romans and the Sabine women is offered, less to educate the audience than justify the pillage. It’s historical inevitability, is it not? Like Oregon Neanderthals are better than the greatest empire ever conceived. When in Rome is adopted as a mantra, and everyone settles in for the ultimate in master/slave dynamics. Thank God there are more unmemorable tunes to get us through to the end.
The families of the kidnapped continue to object, but every last rape victim is so puffed with pride, they can’t help but relent to the demands for marriage. It’s one big shotgun wedding, as all the girls announce they’re pregnant, and no one present is bright or patient enough to sort out paternity. Unhinged orgies have a way of doing that. No matter. By next winter, we’ll be fourteen adults deep, with seven screeching babies to match, all locked away in a few rooms with no hope of escape. All snug as bugs in rugs, like a 19th century Overlook Hotel. Thankfully, there are enough axes to go around.
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